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While the French seamstress turned scientist Jeanne Villepreux-Power was solving the ancient mystery of the argonaut, her compatriot Jean Baptiste Vérany (1800–1865) — a pharmacist turned naturalist and founder of Nice’s Natural History Museum — set out to illuminate the wonders of cephalopods in descriptions and depictions of unprecedented beauty and fidelity to reality. Half a century before the stunningly illustrated Cephalopod Atlas brought the life-forms of the deep to the human imagination, Vérany published Mediterranean Mollusks: Observations, Descriptions, Figures, and Chromolithographs from Life — a consummately illustrated catalogue of creatures entirely alien to the era’s lay imagination, suddenly and vividly alive in full color.
When Vérany began working on his dream of bringing the underwater world to life on the page, chromolithography — a chemical process used for making multi-color prints — was still in its infancy in France. Determined to capture the living vibrancy of these creatures that had so enchanted him, he set out to teach himself the craft. Looking back on his long labors at mastering this art-science and applying it to his dream, he reflects:
Despite having no practice at lithography and no knowledge of chromolithography, I launched myself, with courage and confidence, into this enterprise… Thanks to trial and error and patience, I have often succeeded in depicting the softness and transparency that characterize these animals.
The German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology, was introduced to the wonders of cephalopods by Vérany’s work and incorporated some of the art into his own studies of symmetry. Victor Hugo copied one of Vérany’s illustrations in ink for his 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea. The book itself became a catalyst for the study of octopus intelligence.
Radiating from the chromolithographs is Vérany’s shimmering passion for his subject. He was especially captivated by the red umbrella squid, Histioteuthis Bonelliana, which he saved from a fisherman’s net and placed in a tub to study and draw from life, wonder-smitten by its beauty. He recounts:
It was at this moment that I enjoyed the astonishing spectacle of the brilliant points whose forms so extraordinarily decorate the skin of this cephalopod; sometimes it was the brightness of the sapphire which dazzled me; sometimes it was the opaline of the topazes which made it more remarkable; other times these two rich colors confused their splendid rays. During the night, the opaline points projected a phosphorescent glare, making this mollusk one of the most brilliant productions of Nature.
Complement with Ernst Haeckel’s otherworldly drawings of jellyfish from the same era, then revisit Sy Montgomery on how the octopus illuminates the wonders of consciousness.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“How can the bird that is born for joy sit in a cage and sing?” wrote William Blake, who lived in the golden age of the cage as entertainment. Zoos were new and exciting, and people readily overlooked their cruelty to slake their curiosity about creatures from faraway lands. But even so, zoos held only a tiny fraction of the dazzling variousness of the animal kingdom — in the age before photography, before easy global travel, the average person encountered the wondrous strangeness of animals not in the cage but on the page.
In the 1820s, a French natural history encyclopedia titled La Galerie de Oiseaux set out to bring to European eyes the most exquisite birds of North America, many of them now endangered, some extinct. Radiating from the consummate illustrations is the quiet dignity of these bright emissaries of our planet’s evolutionary history — feathered inheritors of the dinosaurs, winged with a kaleidoscope of joy.
Complement with some consummate centuries-old illustrations of monkeys, owls, lizards, butterflies, and flowers.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity,” Rachel Carson told a class of young people in what became her bittersweet farewell to life, after catalyzing the modern environmental movement; she urged them: “You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.”
More than half a century later, another visionary of uncommon tenderness for the living world addresses another generation of young people with a kindred message of actionable reverence for the ecosystem of interdependence we call life.
In Heart to Heart: A Conversation on Love and Hope for Our Precious Planet (public library), the fourteenth Dalai Lama and artist Patrick McDonnell — who illustrated Jane Goodall’s inspiring life-story — invite an ethical approach to climate change, calling on young people to face a world of wildfires and deforestation with passionate compassion for other living beings, and to act along the vector of that compassion with the Dalai Lama’s fundamental philosophy:
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Told with the simplicity and sincerity of language native to Buddhist teaching, the story begins with an improbable visitor showing up at the Dalai Lama’s doorstep: a giant panda — the vulnerable bear species Ailuropoda melanoleuca, endemic to China and beloved the world over, both ancient symbol and Instagram star.
His Holiness greets the furry visitor with the same attitude he greets everyone:
I welcome everyone as a friend. In truth, we all share the same basic goals: we seek happiness and do not want suffering.
Together, they venture out into the wilderness to savor the natural gift of the forest and contemplate the delicate interleaving of life within it. Along the way, the Dalai Lama tells his life-story, laced with his relationship to the natural world — the wild yaks, gazelles, antelopes, and white-lipped deer he encountered on his first journey across Tibet when he was recognized as the next Dalai Lama as a young boy, the comfort he took in the smell of wildflowers after leaving his home, the long-eared owl he watched soar over his first monastery, the mountain foxes, wolves, and lynx roaming the surrounding forest.
With a wistful eye to the decimation of wildlife populations in his lifetime, he tells his new friend and his young reader:
We must never forget the suffering humans inflict on other sentient beings. Perhaps one day we will kneel and ask the animals for forgiveness.
But forgiveness, he intimates, is not enough — we must urgently amend our actions and recover our respect for other living beings, which demands nothing less than a transformation of the human heart and a radical unselfing. Leaning on the Buddhist precepts, His Holiness writes:
Compassion, loving-kindness, and altruism are the keys not only to human development but also to planetary survival.
Real change in the world will only come from a change of heart.
What I propose is a compassionate revolution, a call for radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with the self.
It is a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct which recognizes others’ interests alongside our own.
There is, of course, nothing radical in the notion itself — it is a simple recognition of reality, consonant with the great evolutionary biologist and Gaia Hypothesis originator Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” The radical portion is the commitment to actionable course-correction and recalibration of habitual action — something young people are uniquely poised to do as they take our planetary future into their growing hands and growing hearts.
A century and a half after the great naturalist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” His Holiness writes:
Everything is interdependent, everything is inseparable.
Our individual well-being is intimately connected both with that of all others and with the environment within which we live.
Our every action, our every deed, word, and thought, no matter how slight or inconsequential it may seem, has an implication not only for ourselves but for all others, too.
In a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher and activist Simone Weil’s poignant meditation on the relationship between our rights and our responsibilities, he adds:
We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.
He goes on to explore how this change begins within, with cultivating “a peaceful mind and a peaceful heart” for oneself — the fulcrum of all kindness and compassionate action. Again and again, he returns to Hannah Arendt’s insight that “the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation,” inviting his young readers to remember that the smallest actions in the present accrete into sizable change for the future:
There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done.
One is called Yesterday, and the other is called Tomorrow.
Today is the right day to love, believe, do, and mostly to live positively to help others.
He ends with a prayerful meditation on the inner transformation necessary for a civilizational evolution of consciousness:
May I become at all times, both now and forever,
A protector for those without protection
A guide for those who have lost their way
A ship for those with oceans to cross
A bridge for those with rivers to cross
A sanctuary for those in danger
A lamp for those without light
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter
And a servant to all in need.For as long as space endures,
And for as long as living beings remain,
Until then may I, too, abide
To dispel the misery of the world.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Those of us who have lived with depression know the way it blindfolds us to beauty, the way it muffles the song of life, until we are left in the solitary confinement of our own somber ruminations, all the world a blank. It might feel like the visitation of some monster, but it is not something that happens upon us from the outside — it is our own undulating neurochemistry, it is the parts of ourselves we have not yet befriended, integrated, understood. “The gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain,” William Styron wrote in his timeless account of depression. The pain can feel interminable. It is a lifeline to remember that it is not — that there is an other side, that the blindfold and the muffler can come off just like they came on.
That is what Swedish-born, London-based printmaker and graphic artist Staffan Gnosspelius explores with great subtlety and soulfulness in Bear (public library) — a wordless picture-book for grownups about life with and liberation from depression.
We meet a bear with a body bent in the shape of sorrow and a cone on its head — a cone that won’t come off, only plunging the bear deeper into despair with each failed attempt.
One day, a white rabbit comes along and tries to help the bear take the cone off, but the small creature is powerless to remove it by force — the cone remains, and through it the bear growls the terrifying growl of menacing despair, terrifying his new friend.
So blinded to the reality of the wilderness, the bear comes to perceive the branches of the trees as the tentacles of some monstrous octopus and the blades of the grass as an assault of sharp swords.
Still, the rabbit persists, embracing the bear’s large cone-bowed body and simply being near, bearing witness to the suffering — that best aid for a friend in sorrow.
Watching its friend struggle, the rabbit begins gently singing to the bear.
Everywhere bear and cone go, rabbit and song go.
But when the bear tries to sing back through the cone, only those terrifying growls come out.
And so they continue — the sorrowing bear, the singing rabbit — until one day a trap in the forest snaps shut on the bear’s foot.
It is then, as pain mounts onto pain and becomes unbearable, that something breaks open in the bear and it sings out for help.
Across the forest, the rabbit hears the faint song and rushes over to release its friend.
Set free, the bear thanks the singing rabbit and timidly begins singing back, until a storm of song fills the forest — that great operatic scream of catalytic release, primal and numinous.
So it is that the song of life begins singing itself through the bear and the cone comes gently off — a tender reminder that no one can save anyone, not even with love; that we only ever save ourselves when we are ready: but love is what readies us to be our own savior.
Complement Bear with Bloom — a touching animated short film about depression and what it takes to recover the light of being — and The Rabbit Box — a wondrous vintage picture-book for grownups about the mystery of life — then revisit some of humanity’s most beloved writers on the mightiest antidote to depression.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his timeless treatise on learning love as a skill. We fail at it largely because, given how profoundly shaped we are by our formative attachments, those of us who grew up with instability and violence from our primary caregivers — the people tasked with loving us and teaching us about love — can feel woefully handicapped at love, unconsciously replicating the emotional patterns of those familiar relationship dynamics known as limbic attractors, only to emerge with a colossus of shame and self-blame for what feels like failing at love.
There is no greater consolation for that feeling than the knowledge that one is not alone in it, and that there is a way through it, past it, beyond it, within reach.
That is what artist Tara Booth offers in a largehearted and courageously vulnerable illustrated reckoning she published on that industrialized emblem of shame and self-blame, Valentine’s Day.
Complement with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s field guide to learning love, Alain de Botton on love and vulnerability, Eric Berne’s classic Games People Play, and the heartening science of how healthy love rewires the brain, then revisit Shel Silverstein’s lovely illustrated allegory for the simple secret of lasting love.
HT Debbie Millman.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
Felicia Chiao was working as an industrial designer at IDEO when A24 reached out and told her that Daniel Kwan, director of their highest-grossing film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, wanted to collaborate. The project was not a movie, but one of two picture books that Kwan had written (24 Minutes to Bedtime and I’ll Get to the Bottom of This), to be published by A24 as part of their expansion into children’s literature. Neither Kwan, Chiao, nor A24 had gone through the process of publishing a picture book from start to finish, which is perhaps why the final product is so strange and delightful.
Much in the way that Everything Everywhere All At Once layers dimensions in the multiverse, 24 Minutes to Bedtime layers dimensions of time. Each set of facing pages counts one minute closer to Winston’s eight o’clock bedtime. “Why can’t we stay up later?” he mourns, to which his dad answers, “Because . . . this is all the time you get.” With the help of a time machine, Winston fills every minute with chaos, as four different versions of him time-jump between pages, running from the inevitable. Chiao embedded mini storylines throughout the illustrations, and readers can choose to follow any of the Winstons, countless hidden easter eggs, or his frazzled parents. As Winston tries to slow the minutes, his parents wish they could fast forward. When he finally falls asleep in their arms though, they realize that truly, this is all the time they get.
Chiao has been drawing since she was a child, and thought of it not as a profession, but as a coping mechanism. Struggling to express her feelings, she drew in notebook after notebook through her school years and beyond. She began sharing her drawings on Instagram, but her account didn’t take off until the pandemic. When lockdowns began, she steadily gained an audience, and now has a following of over half a million. At the beginning of 2022, she left her job to become a full-time illustrator. On a phone call from Texas where she was visiting family for the holidays, she spoke with me about being part of this inexperienced yet brilliant team, working with Daniel Kwan, her own artistic process, and how her mental health has both shaped her work and transformed within it.
***
The Rumpus: Looking at your body of work, one of the things I notice is the dreamy state it creates. There’s a sense of both mundanity and magic, a melancholy about the passage of time, but also humor and joy. Your art seems like a perfect fit for something that Daniel Kwan would write. How did this partnership come along?
Felicia Chiao: A24 had a list of people they were interested in working with, and Daniel had his own list. It seems I was on both, so they reached out to me. I knew A24 as the movie house, but I didn’t know anything about publishing or children’s books, and they didn’t really have a clear idea of how it was going to be done either, so it was new for all of us.
Rumpus: Traditionally, a children’s book author and illustrator might work separately, but it seems there was so much integration between the text and the images. Did you and Daniel work closely together on these things, or follow a more traditional model?
Chiao: I originally anticipated the more traditional model. I thought they were going to give me a storyboard and I was going to translate it into my style. But on one of the very first calls with everyone, they said, “We don’t know what we want the characters to look like or how we want anything done,” and they turned to me and asked, “Do you want to help us figure that out?” This wasn’t what I signed up for originally, but I’m glad it turned out that way because it gave me a lot more freedom.
Rumpus: As I was reading the book, I was thinking the family looked a bit like Daniel’s.
Chiao: I hadn’t actually seen a picture of his kid until later in the process, but, you know, every Asian child has that bowl cut. Originally, I’d drawn the dad as a bald man with a mustache, very stereotypical, and the mom with her hair up in a bun. They said, “Actually, we’re aiming for the A24 audience now—Millennials becoming parents—so the dad can be a little more hip.” I realized both dads on the video call were wearing beanies and had long hair, so I thought, “Well, I’ll take from life.”
Rumpus: What was the creative process of working with Daniel like?
Chiao: We would go through his stick figure storyboard online together and try to catch all the errors, because it’s a very complex book with connecting lines in different chronological orders. So there was a lot of conversation, a lot of back and forth. For example, triple-checking that the pajamas matched up on the right page, and that what each version of the character was talking about made sense in the time jumps. I didn’t really understand this book until I had to draw every single page.
It was also an interesting process because I work traditionally. I don’t do anything digital really. For a book, especially with the repeating imagery of this one, we had to tailor it to fit my process. I was able to make a few drawings and scan them, then I would Photoshop in the different elements and characters and move around the speech bubbles that I hand-lettered.
It was a very strange process because of the way we all work—the A24 team versus Daniel, versus my abilities and the tools I had—to make this book come to life. We thought we would be done in June or March of this year and we finished maybe August or September. It all started in November last year, before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out.
Rumpus: The book reminds me of Everything Everywhere All at Once in the way it plays with time and dimension, and how there are so many threads to track. I imagine it was a challenge to illustrate.
Chiao: Yeah, I was having a really hard time in the beginning figuring out the book. Then when I went to the screening and saw Everything Everywhere All at Once, all of it clicked. Suddenly, it made a lot of sense. I got what he wanted, and what he was doing creatively. After that, it made the book a little easier.
Rumpus: I can see how that would happen. Artists are often preoccupied with getting at deeper truths around the same themes, and there were many that crossed over between this book and the film.
Chiao: Yeah, there was that vibe of nothing matters, do what you want, but everything actually matters so much. Wrestling with that idea was inspiring. A lot of times, I think artists are paralyzed by the fear of making something bad, so they procrastinate or don’t start a piece at all. When I first started concepting the house and the characters for the book, I spent so much time agonizing over small details. I drew several versions of Clarence, the stuffed rabbit, and nothing felt quite right. Eventually I just said “fuck it” and made what we called “long Clarence.” Did the shape really matter in terms of the story? No. But giving the stuffed toy an irregular shape added to the overall vibe of the story.
Do what you can or want and have fun with it; you’ll be surprised how much impact something you’ve made can have on other people when you’re not stressing about how to do it the “best” way. I’m so used to consultancy life where you just deliver what you think the client wants. And Daniel is such a big proponent of saying, “Well, what do you think? What do you want to do? What’s interesting to you? Let’s make it happen.” It was a really lovely reminder that I’m going to enjoy the work more if I do what I think is best. They hired me for my work, so I should be able to push my ideas a little bit stronger.
Rumpus: The subtitle of the book is “a 4-dimensional bedtime story,” and its nonlinear nature invites the reader to revisit it again and again, even more than the usual return to a children’s book, because you can read it differently each time. You did such a wonderful job of creating these layered reads and offering something new to discover with each one.
Chiao: Well, thanks. In my drawings that are interiors, I always love adding little details and objects all around the page. I think it gets people to look at your work a lot longer, especially in the time of social media where you stare at something for three seconds and keep scrolling. People tell me that they stop and zoom in, and they look for all the pieces. When you spend twenty to thirty hours on a drawing, you want people to look at it.
Growing up, I loved Richard Scarry. He had a book about vehicles and all I remember is looking for gold bugs on all the pages. I don’t remember the story. I don’t remember the rest of the book. I just remember every night I would go look for the bug even though I knew where it was already. So, I like the idea of a kid being able to enjoy little elements of the illustration and the art, even if they’re not reading per se.
Rumpus: Can you tell me more about your influences? For this book but also for your work in general?
Chiao: I didn’t use too much for this project besides the vague nostalgia of the books I grew up on. I knew this wasn’t about reading a book front to back like adults do. It’s more of a journey. I knew whatever Daniel was coming up with probably wasn’t going to be a standard children’s book, and I didn’t want to have that gut feeling where I’d be thinking, well, that’s not how it’s done. I also felt that if I looked at a stack of children’s books now, it would influence me too much in a way that isn’t authentic to my style, which is kind of how I handle life, too.
I don’t like looking at too many artists or illustrators because I don’t want to inadvertently copy what they’re doing. A lot of my work is inspired through film and music and the world around. If a song I like has a strong emotion in it, I try to go off that feeling. I want to portray that in my illustrations. My biggest inspiration, I think, is the artistic process itself. I like making things, so how I feel while I’m making it, that’s what translates into the drawing.
Rumpus: I was sharing your work with a writer friend, and she remarked on how every image felt like being dropped into the middle of a story. When you create your own art, does it stem from a larger narrative playing out in your mind?
Chiao: I think I’m very lucky that there’s a storytelling aspect people can connect with, because that isn’t done on purpose. Images show up in my head. Then there’s a queue in my brain of what drawings I’m going to do next, and they stack up until I can get them out. A lot of times, it’s because I love the materials I use, which are alcohol-based markers and pens. I’m dabbling a bit with watercolor now. I know my tools well though. So I’ll think, “Oh, I wonder if I can make colors a certain way,” or “I want to draw this rounder shape,” and it’s just purely selfish. It’s the idea of, oh, I really want to draw a certain shape or certain lighting, or maybe sometimes when things are chaotic, I want to draw one point perspective interiors, because grids and perspective have rules.
Rumpus: It makes so much sense to me that during the pandemic, everyone found your work. The sentiments that I either read in your captions or find in your images signal that here is an artist who really has her finger on the pulse of what we’re all going through.
Chiao: It’s a little sad because I’ve been drawing the figure alone in interiors for a long time, and when the lockdown happened, my work blew up. I recognized, “Oh, suddenly everyone’s depressed at the same time.”
I think because I’ve had mental illnesses for a very long time; it’s not something I’m actively fighting against anymore. A lot of my work is about exploring what it’s like to live with it. There are still good days and then you’re having a bad day, and they’re both equally right. The little blob creature I draw that a lot of people seem to like is mostly anxiety. It’s a mix of things, but it used to be within the figure’s body impacting it. Now it hangs around in the house like a cat as a companion. People have interpreted it 100 different ways. I don’t actually know what’s right, because I’m not thinking too hard about what the drawing means. I do a drawing a week. So I’m glad people are finding meaning in it because sometimes I just want to draw a grid. I’ll put up a drawing that was done purely for technical reasons, and people will comment, “Oh my God, I feel this.” And I’m so curious: What are you feeling?
Rumpus: That’s part of what’s beautiful about your work. You leave space for the viewer to fill it with what they need. I noticed in 24 Minutes to Bedtime that there are multiple pages with illustrations and no words. In the beginning there’s an empty landscape, then the frame of the house being built, which I really only appreciated after I’d gotten to the last pages where you see the decay of the house. It was such a poignant way to show that this is all the time we have and it’s so fleeting. Was having these images without text part of the plan from the beginning?
Chiao: That was all Daniel [Kwan]. You just described exactly what he wanted people to feel. I’m so glad that came across because at first we knew we wanted the beginning scenes of the field and then the house showing up, but I did question the ending because I thought it looks like they’ve all died. We decided to stick with it though, because the story is talking about the passage of time. Even though the parents are so stressed and so tired, they recognize that this is all the time we get. Even if in the moment it doesn’t seem like the best thing ever, we have to appreciate this time.
I didn’t exactly have “this is all the time we get” in my mind before this project, but I had a similar thought in my work about “maybe this is all there is.” It’s the idea that so many of us are waiting for things to work out, for the next big experience or memory to define life by, but maybe life is really just about appreciating the day-to-day ups and downs that make up the majority of our lives. Stuff that seems simple now may carry a lot of nostalgia later, and I think the best we can do is to be grateful that we get to experience it all.
Daniel came at it from a film perspective of having opening shots and closing shots, and the text that comes in like credits. So it’s also been interesting working on a book with someone who normally does movies, because the vision is not what we’re used to seeing in books.
Rumpus: It feels full circle that you aren’t influenced necessarily by specific illustrators, but by film and by music. This partnership between the two of you seems like such a great fit for that reason as well.
Chiao: I still can’t believe it happened. I’m glad it’s done but I’m so appreciative of the opportunity because I don’t regularly freelance, which has been good and bad. It’s like a rubber band. It was stretched out when I was working for other people. Now I purely do only what I want to do. With freelance, I have to give up a little bit of control, but this was one of the first times genuinely working with another creative person that has expanded my idea of what good work is and how I want to work.
***
Self-portrait by author
Birds populate our metaphors, our poems, and our children’s books, entrance our imagination with their song and their chromatically ecstatic plumage, transport us on their tender wings back to the time of the dinosaurs they evolved from. But birds are a time machine in another way, too — not only evolutionarily but culturally: While the birth of photography revolutionized many sciences, birds remained as elusive as ever, difficult to capture with lens and shutter, so that natural history illustration has remained the most expressive medium for their study and celebration.
To my eye, the most consummate drawings of birds in the history of natural history date back to the 1830s, but they are not Audubon’s Birds of America — rather, they appeared on the other side of the Atlantic, in the first volume of The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, with the Animal Kingdom of the Baron Cuvier, published in the wake of the pioneering paleontologist Georges Cuvier’s death.
Hundreds of different species of birds — some of them now endangered, some on the brink of extinction — populate the lavishly illustrated pages, clustered in kinship groups as living visual lists of dazzling biodiversity.
Among the cornucopia of species depicted — pigeons and parakeets, warblers and jays, woodpeckers and owls, sunbirds and sugarbirds — none occupy more space than hummingbirds, perhaps due to their enduring enchantment partway between science and magic.
Couple with some stunning 19th-century ink illustrations of owls, dial back a century with the trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone’s paintings of exotic, endangered, and extinct species, and dive into the fascinating science of feathers.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
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